Past Conferences

Click on the conference topics to see the programs

XVIth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association
Los Angeles, California, USA
25-27 June, 2009
Rousseau's Legacies/ Fortunes de Rousseau

The Rousseau Association came to Los Angeles on the invitation of the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies. Twenty-four papers covered such topics as education, politics, nature, marginality, music, the self, and the influence of Rousseau on (among others) Adam Smith and Tolstoy. The congenial surroundings of UCLA also gave many opportunities for informal discussion and exchange.

Rousseau Association Panels at ASECS
Portland, Oregon
March 27 - 30, 2008
Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles

XVth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association
Hosted by the LIRE XVIIIème siècle research group, Université de Lyon II, Lyon, France
June 28th to 30th, 2007
Rousseau and the Philosophes/Rousseau et les philosophes

The Rousseau Association came to Lyon on the invitation of the eighteenth-century team of the research group LIRE (Litteratures, Ideologies, Representations), which is jointly funded by the CNRS (French National Research Council) and Lyon II University. The colloquium was held in central Lyon, at the university and in the Institute for Human Sciences nearby. In addition to the academic program, we had some pleasant evenings together, and visited Chambéry and Les Charmettes after the conference. This was the Rousseau Association's first colloquium in France, held in a city that Rousseau visited frequently and knew well.

XIVth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
June 9-12, 2005
The Nature of the Reveries: A colloquium on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782)
The 2005 colloquium of the Rousseau Association, "The Nature of the Reveries," brought 32 Rousseau scholars from across the US as well as from Canada, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Hong Kong to the beautiful campus of Hamilton College in upstate New York. In addition to hearing the 27 papers given in plenary session, attendees viewed a special exhibition presented at Hamilton’s Emerson Art Gallery entitled “Nature as Refuge: From Rousseau's Cascade to Central New York's Trenton Falls,” which used images of local natural wonders to illustrate the influence of Rousseau's ideas, especially those found in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, on the way people have regarded nature since the nineteenth century.

Rousseau Association Panels at ASECS
Las Vegas, Nevada
March 31-April 3, 2005
The Discours sur l'inégalité After 250 Years

XIIIth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association
St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
26-29 June, 2003
Rousseau, Voltaire, and Fanaticism